Brads Blog

This website review will focus on a website that is set up to be a personal finance guide.

This website is quite new is blog based. The site claims to be updated daily, and so far has lived up to the promise.

It has some quite interesting content, such as information you don’t need to prvide on a credit card application(which I found interesting)

They also have articles pertaining to 401K’s and home equity loans, but isn’t limited to just that.

Since the site is young, it is hard to tell how broad the content will be for this site, but so far they have included the UK in it. If you’re financially minded, it might be worth checking out.

Yesterday, I went shopping at our local Microcenter with two of my brothers and my Dad. My Dad and my brother were in the market for a new laptop computer and they were interested in the 18 months same as cash option they saw in the ad. They also advertised $100 off purchases over $500 (computers, etc) when you apply for credit.

We milled around the store for a while, brushing of salesmen left and right. Finally, they both had decided on a laptop and went to the credit app area. They had filled out the credit application and then realized that there were two different applications they could fillout. After questioning the rep, they learned that you do not get BOTH 18 months same as cash and $100 off. You could choose between the in store card, and get the 18 months SAC, then get screwed over with 21% interest after the 18 months. Or you can get a hundred dollars off, with an interest rate somewhere around 9%.

This pissed my Dad off, and he decided he’s not messing with it. My brother went with the lower interest rate and $100 off.

My brother then went back to the laptop area and waited around for a salesman. Where were they?

Finally, he was helped. The guy decided it was time to find out if the laptop he wanted was even in stock. Fortunately, it was and the salesman went to get it. When he returned with the laptop, he was approached by another salesman. This guy was not happy. I guess he figured since he was the first one to nagg us, he owned the sale. I thought a fight was going to break out.

After the dominant salesman prevailed, the bullcrap really started to get deep. I was getting really irritated by the way the salesman was trying to sell my brother everything under the store.

“How old is your surge protector?” He would ask. I didn’t know they went bad after a couple of years!

After my brother answered that he already had a supply of CD-R’s, the guy came back with “What kind?”

It was a bad experience for me, and I do not plan to eer buy from there. If you ave had similar experiences at MicroCenter, I would be interested to hear it!

I thought I would explain the sudden software review frenzy on Bradsblog lately.

I have agreed to do various software reviews on Bradsblog. The latest round of reviews have been those of Mystik Media, and I would expect things to return to normal very soon.

I would also like to add that I am on vacation from my “real job” this week. Like you, I have been very busy this week. With trying to get all of my last minute Christmas shopping done, wrapping gifts, visiting people and on top of that-I’m working on finishing my basement and keep the blog going. There’s just not enough hours in the day!

I would expect there to be a few product reviews in the coming weeks. Between my whole family, there are a lot of gifts that are going to be passed around.

My next Software review is for the screensaver generation program called GraFX Saver Pro. This is yet another program in the Mystik Media review series.

The trial version I downloaded is a 20 day evaluation. I installed it without any problems and within a couple of minutes I had the program up and running.

The first thing you do is select specific files to be added to your screensaver, or you can select whole files, or both.

After you select the files, you can select special effects for the pictures. This is pretty neat. It displays a preview before you commit to certain effects.

After you have settled on what files you want to include and the special effects they have, you finalize it by selecting where you want the screensaver file stored.

This is nice becasue you can burn it to a cd and share it with others.

The file you are left with is a self extracting file that installs a screensaver on your computer.

When the screensaver starts, it flips through all the images you have selected, and when I tested it, all the kids wanted to sit around my computer staring and talking about all the pictures. It provided a couple of minutes of entertainment before they returned to their sugar induced hyperactive state.

If you are using the trial version, your screensaver will have a small banner letting everyone know you built it from the trial version. I assume the registered version will not have it.

This program gets two thumbs up from me, and if you can afford the $75 this program costs, I would recommend it.

You can try it out for yourself or learn more about it here.

I was reading a Foxnews.com story about the transit workers in New York taking to the picket lines. This is union work at its finest, and I love it!

I can only hope that the government doesn’t step in and do something drastic and screw up the whole process.

President Bush has no dount been putting forth a lot of effort to bring up his approval ratings. I, for one, like it. He has needed to do this or a long time. I think he has finally gotten to the point where he is outpacing the democratic hype and I am very curious to see some fresh polling data.

Today I’ll be reviewing the Mystik Media program AudioCommander.

After I installed the free trial version of this program, I launched it and noticed the simplistic design of the program. This was not surprising, because this is not the first Mystic Media program I had done a review on.

One thing I have learned is that I shouldn’t judge a program’s ability by it’s simplicity.

The main functin of this program seems to be to convert from one audio file format to another. There were so many different file formats, I had never even heard of most of them. This program seems to be written for the professional, but is simple enough for the every day Joe to use.

Here is part of the description according to their website:

AudioCommander is a fast and highly configurable command-line and interface converter, encoder, and decoder for nearly all conceivable audio formats. Settings are provided for bitrate, frequency, channels, and more.

Another thing I noticed about this program was that you can change the compression settings of a file.

I gave it a good test by selecting a song in my music library. I picked Hey Mickey by Toni Basil. It was an mp3 file and I selected it to be converted to a wma file. The function was complete in about ten seconds.

Like any other software that offers a free trial, I would recommend you try it before you buy it. For the full blown version you are looking at $64.95

Today I took a look at Mystik Media’s AutoImager. This program appears to be designed to keep things simple for the user, but provide a lot of options.

There isn’t a lot of toolbars to fool around with or menus to search. Everything seems to be right there.

You select filters simply by checking a box.

Something nice about this program is that there is a preview pane so you can see what the image will look like as you’re doing your work.

I went on to see about file conversion. There are over 35 different file types you can convert to/from. I thought this was a bit impressive. I could see whee this program would be very useful for someone who deals with a lot of different images.

This program can be tested, like I did, with a 15 day trial. If you decide to buy it, it’ll cost you $60.

You can find out more about AutoImage, see more screenshots, as well as download the software here

I hear people refer to the upcoming generation as the “me generation”. This is because they supposedly only think of themselves, wrapped up in their video games. I think the me generation is already among us.

This last year, I have heard numerous people brag about how they get over on the system, whether it be filing bankruptcy or taking advantage of some other government program. It’s amazing how these leeches don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. According to these people, these are just systems in place for them to use.

It is people like this that make these government programs problematic. Just because you can qualify for a program, doesn’t mean you should take advantage of it. After all, someone has to pay for it.

I’m not sure how many people have been subsribng to my RSS feed, but something happened late last week and I had some major problems. However, I think I resolved them. I won’t get into many details, but if you subscribe, you will need to change the feed url. It is now http://feeds.feedburner.com/bradsblog/MRwq

I apologize for any inconvenience.